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A new portal has been launched to let visitors explore what South Africa has to offer in wine tourism.
The portal provides a co-ordination platform on wine tourism, with relevant information, links and online bookings also in the pipeline. Visitors are steered across a wide network of wine routes and regions on the website, providing big and small wine regions with a platform on which to promote themselves.
The one-stop searchable wine tourism portal is a key project of the Wine Industry Strategic Exercise (WISE), and aims to bring the wine and tourism sector together to attract a larger share of international and domestic travellers.
The initiative promotes alignment and collaboration between various stakeholders operating in the wine and tourism sectors, as well as the government and private sector.
“We believe that this new platform will facilitate co-operation and communication within the wine industry, and allow each of our diverse wine routes to showcase its distinct offerings, stimulating local economic development where it is most needed, at rural and local level,” says Siobhan Thompson, CEO of Wines of South Africa.
The tourism industry is a major contributor to the South African economy and employment, contributing around 9% of GDP, with wine and food tourism being central to tourism.
CEO of Wesgro, Tim Harris said: “In the Western Cape, approximately 250 000 jobs are in the tourism industry and the gross-value-added contribution to the province is R3.5bn (€234m) … Many of these jobs are in food- and wine-related businesses.”
Rico Basson, MD of VinPro, said working towards a sustainable community was what VinPro was all about, and hoped that the platform would unlock the future potential for the industry.
At the recent MUST Wine Summit in Portugal, Felicity Carter, Editor-in-Chief of Meininger’s Wine Business International, said:”Wine tourism is a subset of experiential tourism. Most people aren’t wine geeks and they embed the wine in a larger context, usually in gastronomy tourism, which is growing.”
She had a strong message for the wine industry: “Wine tourism will be the salvation of the wine trade if they can get it right.”
“The South African Wine Routes Forum is excited about the new initiative and we believe that it will encourage visitors to visit our respective regions. To date, we have been working individually to promote and market our regions. Competition is tough and resources limited, so we see this collaborative effort as a positive move forward for the industry as a whole,” says Melody Botha, Chairperson of the South African Wine Routes Forum.
Sоurсе: tourismupdate.co.za
